HAS she done enough? Theresa May, that is. Has she done enough to squander what every pundit, and most of the rest of us, considered a virtually unassailable lead when she triggered the general election?

She’s doing her best. Opinion polls show Tory support more than halving from a commanding 15 points at the start of the campaign to just six. With only a week to go, that’s narrow enough to bring a tight finish, especially if voting intentions continue to move in the present direction.

With Labour headed by a leader almost universally considered unelectable at the outset of the campaign, this is quite an achievement for Mrs May. And since she has chosen to fight the election under her own banner rather than that of her party, she will find it hard to shift the blame for any victory less than crushing from her own shoulders.

Almost certainly the Tories will still win. But Mrs May’s Brexit hand will be seriously weakened, her gamble aimed at strengthening it failing disastrously.

What has gone wrong? Paving the way, even before the Tory manifesto was published, for a return of hunting will certainly have cost votes. Thankfully the diminishing prospect of a Tory landslide makes it doubtful whether enough support can be mustered to restore the anachronistic ‘sport’, opposed by 85 per cent of the population.

Meanwhile, however, more votes will have been shed by hits at pensioners, who provide a hard core of Tory support. The expected scale of her victory perhaps persuaded Mrs May that she could safely axe the universal winter fuel payment in England. A bad misjudgement.

Of course there are many recipients of the fuel payment, my wife and I among them, who can afford to heat their own homes. Nonetheless the payment lifts the state pension, which is among the poorest in Europe. So the cutback is an attack on the pension, further weakened by removing an element of the triple lock.

It is also certain that at least some of those for whom the now-to-be-means-tested fuel payment is a potential life-saver will fail to get it by not applying – either by choice, inability or ignorance. And the iniquity of this particular measure doesn’t stop there.

Promising to retain the payment north of the border, the Tories claim Scotland is colder in winter. But the Gulf Stream keeps western Scotland, and its northern tip, warmer than eastern Britain down to Lincolnshire.

Truth is the Tories need every vote in Scotland. So we’ve had Ruth Davidson, the Scots’ Tory leader, virtually gloating over the fact that, under an arcane provision in the infamous Barnett formula, which delivers around £1,500 more of public money per head to Scotland than to regions like the North-East, axing the winter fuel payment in England will conveniently shunt just enough money into Scotland to cover its winter fuel payments – to rich and poor alike.

Devoting more than any Tory leader’s usual attention to Scotland – and indeed the North-East – Mrs May loudly bangs the drum for One Nation – “our precious union”. Due to her own policies, the reality looks increasingly different.

And where is Brexit? "Unelectable"Jeremy Corbyn has displaced it as the Number 1 issue by reviving a vision of a socialised state that turns out to still have strong appeal. Message there somewhere.